The Seattle Art Museum has withdrawn plans to wager a ceremonial mask on the outcome of the Super Bowl after complaints by the B.C. First Nation who created the artwork.

Carved by the ancestors of the Nuxalk Nation more than 100 years ago in what is now the Great Bear Rainforest, the mask was never meant to be shown in public, much less be used to bet on football games.

“It’s a high-ranking mask for the chief’s sacred dances,” Wally Webber, elected chief of the Bella Coola-based Nuxalk Nation told the CBC this week. “To see it being used this way in a bet is not very kosher with us.”

On Monday, the Seattle Art Museum announced that it had struck a bet with the Denver Art Museum over the outcome of this Sunday’s Super Bowl, in which the Seattle Seahawks are playing the Denver Broncos.

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If the Seahawks won, the Seattle museum was to receive a three-month loan of The Broncho Buster, an iconic sculpture by American artist Frederic Remington.

In the event of a Broncos victory, Seattle would ship its Nuxalk Forehead Mask to Colorado. Created around 1880, the mask has been in the museum’s collection since 1991 when it was donated by a Seattle benefactor.

Ms. Brotherton calls the mask “one of the best pieces in our collection,” but a Monday statement from the museum also made sure to note its resemblance to the Seahawks’ logo, which is inspired in part by Pacific Coast aboriginal art.

Almost as soon as the Super Bowl wager became known, members of the Nuxalk were expressing their discontent online, as well as to local media outlets, including the CBC.

“I know that our initial response was objection,” said Charles Nelson, a hereditary chief with the Nuxalk.

At a meeting of the hereditary chiefs on Tuesday night, Mr. Nelson said they drafted a letter to the museum acknowledging that curators meant no harm by the wager, but noting their displeasure.

“Museums in general bring mixed feelings to our people, but at the same time we realize that museums are working hard to create new ways of working with Indigenous people in general,” he said.

Speaking to the CBC, Chief Webber noted the Seattle museum did not even identify the mask correctly. A Monday press release wrongly states that the mask is “possibly a supernatural ‘man-eater.’”

While Nuxalk mythology does indeed feature a being that feeds on men, the Seattle mask is not one of them. The mask actually depicts a raven.

Reports of Nuxalk objections quickly attracted the attention of the museum, which announced Wednesday that it was withdrawing the mask from the wager.

“I called the elected chief, Wally Webber, and he just let me know that they were against their mask being used in what was perceived as being in a gambling arena,” said Barbara Brotherton, curator of Native American Art for the Seattle museum.

Instead, the Seattle museum has chosen a different piece, Sound of Waves, a six-panelled screen created in 1901 by Japanese artist Tsuji Kakō. Notably, the piece still features a Seahawk-like raptorial bird.

Nuxalk masks, like the masks carved by many other West Coast First Nations, were never intended as display art. Rather, they are seen as physical manifestations of supernatural entities.

“Masks were always used in the context of ceremonies and were closely associated with the costume a dancer wore,” wrote Vancouver-based archaeologist Lisa Seip in a 1999 paper on the Nuxalk.

At the time the Seattle mask was carved, the paper noted, Nuxalk social customs dictated that anybody who revealed the masks to the “uninitiated” outside the context of a ceremony would forfeit their life.

“In other words, no native person in the Bella Coola valley at this time would have ever taken a mask out of its sacred place at any lime other than for a ceremony,” read the paper. “They certainly would not have hung a mask on the wall of their house.”

Like many pieces of Nuxalk carvings in distant ethnographic museums and art collections, it is not known how the Seattle mask left the community.

“We don’t know if somebody took it out [of the community] or if it was stolen,” said Mr. Nelson.

This is the not the first time the Nuxalk have gone public with a plea to dignify a historical mask. In 1996, the Nuxalk obtain a B.C. Supreme Court injunction to halt the sale of an 1860 Nuxalk mask from a Canadian art dealer to a buyer in Chicago.